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Toll Brothers digs in
Construction starts Toll Brothers' Chancellorsville Hunt developmentDate published: 6/4/2004 By RUSTY DENNEN
Preservationists fought for more than two years to keep houses from going up on a chunk of land connected with the May 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville. That fight is over: Luxury homes will soon be built on hundreds of acres on the site along State Route 3. But efforts to preserve part of the historically significant Civil War land continue. Toll Brothers Inc. has opened a sales office on Spotswood Furnace Road to promote its Chancellorsville Hunt development on land it is buying from Spotsylvania County businessman John Mullins. Heavy equipment has begun cutting a road into the largely open swath of farmland west of Chancellor Elementary School. Mullins said yesterday that Toll Brothers signed a contract to purchase 550 acres and has the right of first refusal on an additional 172 acres. That does not include 55 acres zoned for commercial use. "Toll Brothers has been wonderful to work with," Mullins said. The developer, which bills itself as the nation's largest luxury home builder, announced in March that it had purchased 30 home sites and that it eventually planned to build 225 homes on Mullins' property. The first section has been approved by the county. A second 32-lot section is still winding its way through the approval process. As of this week, Toll Land X Limited Partnership had settled on 16 acres for $2.7 million, according to court records. Mullins, who owns Covenant Funeral Service, has made several attempts to develop the 781 acres he bought in two adjoining tracts in 1995 for a total of $2.8 million. In 1999, he withdrew a plan for a golf course, subdivision and office park. Last year, his plan to sell the land to a Northern Virginia developer who wanted to build a large mixed-use village called the Town of Chancellorsville fell through when the county refused to rezone the property for nearly 2,000 dwellings. That proposal drew a storm of protest from preservationists across the country. The tract east of the Chancellorsville portion of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park was part of nearly three days of fighting in the spring of 1863. But some parts of the land are more historically significant than others.
Date published: 6/4/2004
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